The article is not narrow minded but has a narrow focus and only analyses concrete data from a single source. It may be globally accurate but indicates a rising trend in people being interested in python. While Python usage cannot be directly correlatd to SO, we can infer that languages that have more questions have more people using or learning it generally. In the same way languages with a small community of users don't always prefer SO but something more personal like Mailing lists or IRC (eg. J language).

It should be safe to conclude that due to Data Science being the new buzz word and python at the forefront of it all, atleast python is getting a lot of attention even if it doesn't translate directly to more users right away.

The majority of the top CS colleges switched to teaching using Python within the last five years. This provides a big reason for companies to use Python as well, since it drives down the cost of hiring.

It also mean more questions in SO by a lot of lost students.

And it means later, more Python devs on the market.

When I started my job, the company (fairly large one) was mostly Perl. Perl was the big language of a past generation, so when those engineers were hired, Perl was king. I was told by at least two people that having Python on my resume is not a boost for engineering companies (not counting software), as most managers had never heard of it.

Not too many years later, a lot of new work in the company is being done in Python. Why? Because that's what the newer employees know and prefer.

I think in the software world, Python was big a long time ago (even in the days I joined). But non-software companies were stuck with Tcl and Perl for much longer. Now that they're shifting, you will see some of that growth.

You believe that Python would ever generate more questions over time on SO without getting more users/usage?

I guess the mysterious dumbing down of a stable user base is an alternative explanation.

Never underestimate how far users of "sunset technologies" will go to convince themselves that their skill set is outdated. Heck, Embarcadero's C++ product manager insists that "customers tell him" that Delphi (Pascal!) is "five times more productive than Python" and he actually believes this too. The Delphi product manager, meanwhile, told me he sincerely believes that Delphi has had more of an impact on the business world than Python ever has. Meanwhile, the former VP of Developer Relations once polled the first 500 people to upgrade to their newest release of Delphi, crunched the data, and concluded that users really love Delphi (of course, the many who felt the upgrade was light on features and high on price and chose not to upgrade weren't reflected in the data).

It makes me want to pull my hair out.

I'm the biggest python fan you'll meet (ok I'm sure that's not strictly true) but I followed the headline hoping to see more concrete data to support the claim of "Incredible Growth" and came away disappointed.

I did, but I also read the comment: "While this is an interesting statistic there is no additional analysis that it correlates to python's usage growth" -- which is what I responded to.

>There are many possible explanations of a more indirect correlation that could be skewing the numbers in unexpected ways but none are discussed in the article.

Like what though? Aside from some kind of bias on SO I can't think of any alternative explanation that actual growth.

Now, what that growth was based on, that can have many explanations, sure.

To put it another way: do you believe that the first graph in the article directly represents programming language usage percentiles, in the field, over five years? I'm guessing not. I certainly don't.

Here is a graph of programming language popularity on github from 2012-2014:

https://www.loggly.com/blog/the-most-popular-programming-lan...

While this metric is arguably just as fuzzy as any other, the lines in the this graph definitely seem to agree with my gut feeling for language percentiles during that period. I'm not trying to say that my "gut feeling" has any significance. I'm just re-emphasizing that the article didn't give me any useful insight into the significance or meaning of the Stack Overflow statistics. I couldn't find an equivalent chart for the years since 2014 but would love to see one. Either way, it's not like python was ever far behind. It was basically in third place in both the beginning and end of that time period. But in the beginning of the SO chart it's in sixth place. And the SO chart doesn't even include ruby, which is ahead of python in 2012 in the loggly chart. I guess people really don't go to SO for ruby questions? It's certainly possible that the quality of answers on SO for different languages has a lot of variance, which is one possible explanation for the difference. Maybe python questions in 2012 on SO weren't that good. In my experience I'm far more likely to check the python docs before I go looking on SO. Maybe there were changes in google rankings for certain things. Maybe there were certain types of articles that took up the lion's share of growth, like "how to port to python 3", which could have brought existing python devs back into heavy view rotation. Python has also gotten a lot more complicated with things like asyncio, etc., which could again draw more article views but not be directly related to usage growth.

I actually was looking at these numbers just a few days ago, trying to decide on what language to embed in something I'm working on (CPython, Duktape Javascript or Lua), and came to the same confused realization - the number of Python questions on Stack Overflow had increased significantly over the last few years, but I couldn't quite correlate why. I put in a bunch of different related tags, but none of them could account for such a large jump.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=python%2Cdjan...

I'm trying to make a similar decision at the moment - have you chosen which of these languages to use? I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the pros and cons of each.

Python adoption outside first world countries have always lagged considerably behind. A common pattern among technologies.

I suspect a lot of that growth is the rest of the world catching up.

Python's rising popularity among the scientific computing community is simply not enough to support the idea of a dramatic increase in Python adoption. As a long-time user of the language I share your appreciation Python usage in the industry has not dramatically increased in the past few years.

On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence suggesting Python is becoming increasingly popular outside high income countries.